Experimenting with Causality

Experimenting with Causality

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The interdisciplinary CAUS project team wants to examine causality from the research perspectives of both political science and economics. While most economists choose to follow a strictly quantitative approach, many political scientists want to capture the historical-institutional context with qualitative methods.

The Bridging Project aims to detect the connections between the two approaches, and tries to combine game-theoretical modelling and analytical narratives in order to identify causal mechanisms. As a result, it should allow experimental methods to be used for the historical-institutionalist approaches, as well as for experimental approaches to be better contextualized. The analysis of the presidential primaries in the United States in 2016 can be listed as one domain of application for the project, and the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom in 2017 as another.